Damn! I mean “delighted.” Ruined one my best gags. :smack:
Not at all. I’ve seen the movie and the point being made is actually a question: why weren’t law enforcement officials given the opportunity to question family members of the man responsible for the single largest loss of life attack on the U.S. in history?
A former FBI agent that was interviewed asked a telling question: What would have been the reaction of Americans if Timothy McVeigh’s family had been whisked out of the country without being questioned?
One of the first thing the cops do after a heinous crime is talk to the family–the people most likely to have pertinent information as to the perp’s whereabouts and activities.
Moore’s MO is soobvious it is ridiculous to even discuss his lies. Take his 1989 film "ROGER AND ME"everything in this film was taken out of context, distoted, and just plain wrong. For example, he talked about the closing of a GM plant in Flint, MI…according to him, there was a wave of suicides and depression because of the lost jobs. What he didn’t tell you was that GM eventually rehired 95% of the people displaced.
I haven’t seen “911”, but he propbaly uses the same technique…put together a mass of sound bites, and use them to construct the story that HE wants you to hear.
I agree about the Bin Laden evacuation flights though…that thing stinks! 
gcitesot any cites there, ralphie boy?
I am aware of that. I was answering MrRobyn’s post in which she said “Moore asserts that Iraq under Saddam had never attacked or killed or even threatened (his words) any American.”
Note she quoted him as saying American, not America. My responses have been in regard to this quote.
That’s great, and you’re a patriot for giving your service willingingly, obviously with full knowledge of what it entails. But just in the last week I’ve met plenty of military men and their families who do feel exploited, who feel that their service obligations were misrepresented. Maybe these people are fools for not realizing what’s what, and that’s a fair criticism of them, but I don’t think it’s exactly wrong to say that there are people who feel this way, because there are, and they do. They probably should have gotten all the facts, but the reality is that military recruiters, like any salesmen, are making a pitch, not trying to inform, and plenty of people in the process end up with bargains they didn’t even know that they had made. Again, maybe they’re all stupid, but still: they’re there.
As for the vacation issue, I don’t see why it’s not fair game to point out that Bush has been on vacation (as well as flying to and fro from vacations and campaign fundraisers and such) in just three years than many Presidents have been in their entire two-terms. It’s always been fair game to criticize Presidents for fritting away the public dime on lavish relaxation instead of working at least as much as an average American, and it always will be. And Bush has indeed spent enough time away from the job: as well as enough time campaigning instead of leading, to stand out from other Presidents and to face some criticism for it.
What I don’t like about Moore as a filmaker is that he doesn’t set up the sort of wrenching conflict that makes documentaries interesting. He makes political attack films (and in the case of BfC, a polemic that isn’t exactly even targeted anywhere, but is just sort of vaguely polemical at nothing at all). And while occasionally funny (like the color matching lady or the surly felon/airline guy) they aren’t really coherent or convincing. He’s not so much sloppy with the facts as he is sloppy with all sense of context: there’s no exploration of an idea, and that’s what documentaries are all about (I don’t think, from what I’ve heard, that this film is really a doc in any serious way). And yet, I also find a lot of fault with the sort of mob pile-on of everything he says, as if these criticisms, which plenty of people have made, are in some way a different animal from normal political bitchfests. Hitchens’ article, for instance, isn’t ultimately very convincing to me either, and it suffers from all the same defects.
Re flying out the Saudis. Assume for a moment that there was no conspiracy to hide the truth or protect anyone. My question is why did anyone in the govt spend more than 5 minutes worrying about the convenience of a bunch of billionaires. I imagine there were people stuck in airports trying to attend weddings or honeymoons, students trying to get to college, and people trying to see their loved ones in the hospital before they died. Did the govt do anything about them?
Regarding presidential vacations, CNN says this:
The unemployment rate in Flint at the time of the filming of F9/11 was 17%. That’s just people who are collecting unemployment checks. The estimate by an interviewed senior assistant working in the employment agency estimated the actual unemployment (including those no longer qualified to draw a check because of timing out and therefore no longer used as a statistic) to be closer to 50%. So where did the jobs go? Your argument is bullshit.
You’re correct to some extent with this, but I encourage you to see the film before judging the entire work. There are very thought-provoking pieces to this movie, and many questions that Bush needs to answer.
Dig up the old MPSIMS thread about the WTC in the first hours and days. Even here at Straight Dope, a veritable bastion of leftism, a moderator had to step in to beg for calm and reason. The Bin Ladens were in danger for their lives. Richard Clarke was right to give them refuge and send them home. Why do you still to this day dismiss their lives so callously? Just because they’re rich?
Oh, I rather doubt that the Saudis in America were much endangered, they have enough money, they could hire the entire US Army for protection, if they so chose.
Well, actually, they more or less did, didn’t they?
No, actually you and I did that. Contrary to leftist legend, tax dollars do not grow on trees.
OK, i guess that, in the long run, it’s essential to actually address Hitchens’ argument, such as it is.
My first post to this thread was made late last night, when i didn’t have the time to formulate a complete response, and it was somewhat less than temperate. I don’t recoil from anything that i wrote; it’s just that i should realize by now that pointing out the unreflective dribblings of the pro-Bush crowd like the OP is like shooting fish in a barrel, and at the same time completely unproductive. So, let’s have a look at Moore’s film and at Hitchens’ critique. This examination may recapitulate some of the points made by Zoe on the first page of this thread, but i think that’s OK, because they’re points that deserve repeating.
I disagree vehemently with many of Hitchens’ points, but i also find myself agreeing with some of his arguments. Do you see how this works, Airman Doors? It is actually possible to agree with some of a person’s arguments, and yet to disagree with others, and to disagree with the overall picture painted by that person.
Well, as Zoe pointed out quite correctly, this is a dramtic oversimplification on Hitchens’ part, and one that vastly exceeds the reductionism of which he accuses Moore. To argue that a particular group has an influence on US policy is vastly different from saying that they run it outright.
It’s easy enough to see how stupid Hitchens’ argument is here by looking at some other area of possible influence. For example, i think a very good argument can be made that US healthcare policies are influenced, sometimes quite substantially, by Health Management Organizations and health insurance companies and their lobbyists. Some people might see the results of this influence and beneficial or benign, others might see such influence as sinister. But arguing that HMOs have influence in certain policy areas is not the same as arguing that they run the country.
And demonstrating that politicians tend to respond to people and organizations that put money in their pockets–which is what Moore did with the Saudis in his film–is not some wacky conspiracy theory, it’s an attempt at institutional analysis.
Again, i would have hoped that someone as smart as Christopher Hitchens would have had a better understanding of the nuances of international politics than is demonstrated in this sentence. Again he engages in simplistic binarisms that fail to reflect the way that influence is exerted in the world.
Sure, the Saudis might have opposed the removal of the Taliban. I concede that point, mainly because i don’t have any evidence to the contrary on hand, and because it’s not really the key here. But in every situation like this, the players involved have to make judgements based on very complex sets of circumstances. And in this case, the Saudis might well have realized that the US was going into Afghanistan with or without Saudi approval, and decided that it would be better to stay on the good side of their most powerful ally.
Also, as Moore points out in the film, most of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi citizens. Is it too much of a stretch to imagine a US official saying to the Saudis, “Hey, you guys better get on board with this attack on Afghanistan, or people might have to start looking more closely at why the worst attack ever on American soil was carried out by so many citizens of an American friend”? I’m not saying that this is exactly what happened, only pointing out that there was much talk in the immediate post-9/11 period about the involvement of Saudis and about US ties to the Saudi regime. Considerations such as this suggest strongly that Hitchens’ black-and-white argument fails to appreciate (or, more likely, deliberately ignores) the complexity of the situation.
Again, i’m going to ride on Zoe’s argument a bit here. The contradiction that Hitchens claims to be presenting here is no contradiction at all. It is perfectly reasonable to oppose a particular military action and then, when you find out that the action is going ahead, to argue that if it’s going to be done at all, then at least it should be done properly.
More silliness.
While Moore may not have included all of this stuff, those facts do not really undermine his case. Sure, Afghanistan might have an “emerging” army and be part of NATO’s responsibility. But does Hitchens, or anyone else for that matter, really belive that it’s not the Americans who still call the shots with respect to Afghanistan’s military? Furthermore, if the people of Afghanistan are as grateful to America as Hitchens suggests they shold be, then it’s no surprise that Afghanistan fell easily into the “coalition of the willing” that invaded Iraq. Can you really imagine Karzai and the other leaders in Iraq turning around and saying to the US, “No, we’;re not interested in being part of your coalition”? Give me a break!
Hitchens might also be right that the secular left in Afghanistan and Iraq supported the overthrow of their respective regimes. The secular left in Afghanistan wanted to overthrow the Taliban well before the United States took any interest in doing so. In fact, the secular left in Afghanistan was trying to work out ways of throwing out the Taliban at the same time that Taliban leaders were making friendly visits to Texas during GWB’s governorship.
But Hitchens, again going for the “with us or against us” model or argumentation, implies that the secular left’s opposition to the Taliban and to Saddam Hussein also suggests that the secular left was happy with the way that the US-led forces undertook to overthrow and replace those regimes. Again, he fails to appreciate that there are people who opposed the Taliban and Saddam, but who also opposed the methods used by the US to remove them.
This is also true, by the way, of secular leftists elsewhere throughout the world. I’m a secular leftist myself, and i was strongly opposed to both the Taliban and Saddam Hussein well bfore 9/11. Doesn’t mean i agree with the methods used by the United States to remove them ,and nor does it mean that i support the way that the US and its allies and proxies have run those countries since then.
Here we have Hitchens making the same mistake as the OP of this very thread–assuming that if you agree with one position that a person takes, then you must agree with all positions. There is no necessary contradiction if Richard Clarke believes that getting the Saudis out was the right thing to do, but also believes that the Bush administration has fucked up other national security and intelligence issues.
Also, while the 9/11 Commission might have concluded that there was nothing wring with the “timing or arrangement of the flights,” why should this preclude others from believing that the Bin Laden should, at the very least, have been questioned as to what they might have known about the attacks. It’s a little strange that so many conservatives have been willing to give the US government a pass on its awful treatment of prisoners taken during the “war on terror,” and have even been happy to support such treatment when meted out to American citizens (Hamdi and Padilla), and yet are incredulous that some people think we should have questioned the direct relatives of the man repsonsible for 9/11.
I’m not saying, and neither was Moore saying, that the Bin Laden family members should have been dragged off to Guantanamo or shoved into holding cells somewhere. I just find it troubling that the only people allowed to fly in those early days, and the only Arabs the US government seemed overly concerned about protecting, were the same ones who were related to the world’s most wanted terrorist, and who also had massive investments in the United States.
Still on the issue of Richard Clarke, my other problem with Hitchens’ piece is one of interpretation, and i concede that different people might view this in different ways. Having seen the movie last night, i completely disagree with Hitchens’ contention that the film portrayed Clarke as the “brow-furrowed ethical hero of the entire post-9/11 moment.” In fact, i was actually surprised at how little Moore made of Clarke’s former high-ranking position in the government, and his subsequent criticism of the administration’s intelligence system. I appreciate that honest people might disagree on this, but i strongly believe that it is a mischaracterization on Hitchens’ part; Clarke was not the ethical, or even the evidentiary core of the film. Of course, not having seen the film, and showing little inclination to do so, the OP will have more than the usual trouble addressing this issue.
Again, a silly non-sequitur. Doing work does not necessarily mean that Bush has to be planning for “future aggressive wars.” In case anyone failed to notice, even if we put aside all the terrorism and foreign policy issues, at the time that Moore is talking about the nation’s economy was also going to hell in a handbasket.
I do agree with Hitchens that the President does not have to be in Washington in order to be working. I also agree that it is possible for Bush to perform many of his duties while on his ranch in Crawford. And i think that Moore probably made too much of Bush’s golfing and other vacation activities. But Hitchens conveniently ignores the totality of these vacation images, and what they may (or may not) say about Bush’s level of commitment, and chooses instead to comment on an image of Bush at Camp David, ignoring all the silly photo-ops like serving grits in a restaurant or playing golf or cutting wood or skeet-shooting that Bush seems to love so much.
When discussing another of Bush’s comments, where he gives a speech on terrorism and then tells reporters to watch his golf swing, Hitchens says:
Even if Hitchens really believes that, there is no way that he can present it as anything but a subjective belief of his own. Surely anynoe who spent even a few moments reading the press during the Clinton presidency must know that Clinton was often subjectred to much less well-deserved criticism by a media that often went looking for all the dirt it could find. And, as others have already pointed out, even the perenially-popular Ike was subjected to some criticism for his leisure activities.
Again, Hitchens completely misses the point. The point is not about exactly what Bush should have done. Rather, Moore’s point is to demonstrate that, in the absence of his handlers and media people, the President of the United States had absoutely know idea of what to do in that situation. And that’s a pretty worrying thought for many Americans, not just for what it says about that particular issue, but for what it says about the general competence of the Commander in Chief.
This is where i find myself agreeing most strongly with Hitchens. I think that Saddam Hussein essentially got a free ride from Moore, and that the film-maker erred egregiously in his apparent attempt to portray pre-invasion Iraq as some sort of idyllic playground for happy children. Those of us on the left have been constantly saying that, just because we oppose the US-led invasion does not mean that we support Saddam Hussein. I don’t believe that Moore supports Hussein either, but it would have made his case much stronger had he not made Iraq seem like a safe haven that was destroyed only by American bombs.
The only possible mitigation i can find for Moore in these scenes is that he was trying to show that, even under an often-brutal authoritarian, many people do in fact live fairly normal, day-to-day lives. Children play, people go to work, families sit around the table and laugh. This is true of just about any dictatorship. Moore was obviously also making the point that those most affected by conflicts such as this are often those, like children, who have done nothing wrong and who have no chance to avoid the carnage. Still, i think that implicitly claiming that there was nothing wrong with Iraq before US troops arrived was a very poor decision on Moore’s part, and one that i disagree with.
The fact that bombs were falling on Saddam’s palaces and military centers, however, is irrelevant. Even the US military agrees that its weapons do not always hit their target, and that civilian deaths are an inevitable part of a campaign like this one. Moore never alleged that these civilian deaths were policy, and he also interviewed soldiers who lamented the civilian casualties but who said that they were unavoidable. The film simply pointed out that, whatever the motivations for the invasion or the intentions of the troops, there were some horrific consequences for thousands of Iraqi civilians. If you disagree that this has, in fact, bewen the case in Iraq, i guess there’s nothing that Moore, or i, can say that would change your mind.
This is another area where i tend to agree with Hitchens. I heard the narrative the same way that he did–it seemed to me that Moore did, in fact, allege that Saddam had never tried to harm any Americans. Next time i see the film, i’m going to keep an ear out for the exact wording.
I think this issue serves both to show a problem with Moore’s film, and also with Hitchens’ critique. It’s a problem for Moore’s film because he didn’t need to make such silly statements about Saddam Hussein in order to make his point. For those of us who opposed the invasion of Iraq, it was the Bush administration’s failure to make its case, and its snubbing of the international community and international law, that made the invasion wrong. I agreed that Saddam was a bad guy, and that world would be better with him out of power, but did not believe that the invasion was justified, especially not when it was rationalized as being for US national security.
But this also demonstrates the limitations of Hitchens’ critique, because even if you take out the silly statements about Saddam, the main points of Moore’s argument, regarding the Bush administration handling of the whole situation, still stand and are made very convincingly.
Here Hitchens is just plainly misrepresenting the case.
The first problem with Hitchens’ critique here is that it fails to take account of the temporal factor, i.e., when these things happened. A key point made by the film is that the administration ignored warnings that it received before 9/11 about the possibility of Al Qaeda attacks, specifically involving commercial airliners. The argument is that, had these warnings been taken more seriously, then maybe 9/11 could have been avoided by increasing appropriate security measures.
The assertions about issuing too many security warnings and putting the population under constant fear of attack refer to the period since 9/11, when so many of the “security warnings” have offered nothing more specific than vague and nebulous exhortations to “be alert” or “report any suspicious activity.”
Hitchens seems unable to formulate the logical position that many Americans have been taking for the past few years, and one that Moore is supporting in his film: Security measures are good if they are actually likely to prevent or uncover a threat, and if they are based on good intelligence. But security measures that do nothing but irritate people and/or infringe on their liberty for no noticeable gain in actual safety should be discouraged. Hitchens accuses Moore of trying to have it three different ways, but fails himself to appreciate that there is a middle ground between “I think things were fine as they were” and “I think the PATRIOT Act is the best thing since apple pie.”
[Post too long; continued on next post]
[continued from previous post]
This continues from the last point, but i had to address it specifically because Hitchens completely elides the context. Moore points out that experts believe that, had the shoe bomber Richard Reid has a butane lighter instead of matches, he might well have succeeded in blowing up his plane. Yet people are still allowed to take lighters onto planes, but a woman was forced to drink two ounces of her own breast milk in order to prove that it was OK. Was the latter just an overzealous official? Sure. But the fact remains that, even if you don’t have a bomb in your shoe, you could do significantly more damage with a lighter that with many of the things that are not allowed on airplanes. I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that lighting a fire in the confined environment of an airplane cabin night cause some real problems. Moore is just pointing out that, in many cases, security measures and resources are not being well directed.
As i mentioned much earlier, Hitchens continues to misunderstand the complexities of foreign policy. The Saudis can oppose the coalition while still supporting US policy more generally in order to maintain good relations with the world’s only superpower. And the US can accept that there are some deals the Saudis are not willing to make, as long as they play ball in the long term. No contradiction here at all.
Yeah, all those isolationists who want the US to play a greater role in the UN, who want the US to heed UN opinion and advice rather than acting unilaterally, and who want the US to be part of a multi-national effort to rebuild Iraq rather than marching off at the head of a nominal “coalition” that plays only by US rules. Hitchens is really starting to sound vapid now.
Hitchens again conflates two issues, and pretends that they can only be considered together as a single one.
First, he repeats his stupid argument suggesting that it is logically inconsistent to both oppose sending troops, and then to argue that, if troops are going to be sent, then there should be enough to do the job. Because having enough troops there at least serves to reduce the risk; i’ve never been in combat, but common sense suggests that your chances of survival are higher if there are enough people there to cover all the bases rather than being stretched too thin.
Hitchens also makes a nod to Moore’s argument about class represenation in the military without actually appreciating its significance. Hitchens asks, “Does he think…that parents can “send” their children, as he stupidly asks elected members of Congress to do?” Well, no Christopher, he doesn’t. And that’s entirely the point of this rhetorical flourish in the movie. Moore is making a point about choice and options in America, and noting that, of the politicans who make the decisions to send American troops into combat, only one actually has a son or daughter in the service.
Actually, the most interesting part of that Hitchens paragraph is his question about the draft. Sure, it is a “statist and oppressive solution,” but it’s also one that, if fully implemeneted with no loopholes for the rich, might actually make some people think harder about whether or not to send troops to areas where they don’t need to be.
If Moore indeed says what Hitchens attributes to him in the second sentence, then it was a really stupid thing to say.
But i don’t believe that Moore demonstrated an “affected and ostentatious concern for black America” in this film. In fact, if i had to name the social category most prominent in this film, it would probably be “class,” not race. Not only does Moore focus on the lack of options for the poor, but he also has some great footage of Bush describing his supporters as “the haves and the have-mores,” and as “my base.”
So, is this film biased? Sure it is. Moore would happily agree. Moreover, like his other films, it does have some very problematic sections, which i have referred to in this post. But much of Hitchens’ critique contains the same lack of objectivity, and the same selective use of summary and quotation, of which he accuses Moore. Most importantly, in his attempts to smear Moore, Hitchens either conveniently misses or intentionally obscures many of the films most salient points.
[quote=Christopher Hitchens]
By all means go and see this terrible film, and take your friends…]I’ll mirror Hitchens’ statement.
By all means, stay at home and avoid this film. And keep your friends with you.
Just content yourself with letting others speak for you, and then pointing to their comments and saying “I told you so.” Ignorance apparently hasn’t done you too much harm yet, and it might yet give Bush another four years in the White House.
Please forgive spelling and prammatical errors in the previous posts (e.g., “know” instead of “no”). I didn’t have the energy to read through them again.
mhendo, all is forgiven. I would like to personally thank you for the time and effort that you put into what is probably the best response I have ever seen in my years as a lurker and part time poster.
I thought it was a pretty good post, especially for Mhendo. But the part about the “vacations” is still bullshit. Presidents don’t get vacations. What they get is to be someplace they find more comfortable than the White House. Not every president (thankfully) is a Jimmy Carter staring at his desk all day, fretting over the daily White House tennis schedules. Bill Clinton played golf too. And ate grits. Hell, he even took vacations in the Oval Office. Any reality TV show hack can edit together film to make it look like someone is pissing away time on vacation. Moore’s images are nothing but creative editing and do nothing but show his bias.
when you post something as informative and entertaining as that post, maybe then you can give out backhanded compliments. Unytil then, you’ll have to contend yourself as a pot stirrer with a very short spoon.
Thanks. I think.
I think you’re right, for the most part.
But given that so many conservatives had already drawn their conclusions about Moore’s bias well before the film was even released, why not have a little fun? Showing Bush’s “vacations,” or not showing them, was never going to change anyone’s mind about Bush either way. I certainly didn’t consider it a key part of Moore’s film. The left is often accused of not having a sense of humor, but at least in the current President we have something to laugh at, if not with.
I just returned from seeing Fahrenheit 911. Awesome film.
Looking through this thread, I should probably try to work up some lengthy rebuttal. But two problems preclude me from doing this. First, there really aren’t any factual charges to be rebutted, and secondly, I am sadly of the mind that it would not make a whit of difference. Perhaps I am too cynical, and should expect more from others, but all I can say is this. If you are willing to dismiss this movie as lies and propaganda without even seeing it, you are a mealy-mouthed spineless pussy. Working up a thoughtful response would be good only for those who have given the matter a moment’s thought to begin with, rather than parroting others and regurgitating nonsense.
Oh, by the way, if you can name an American who was murdered by Iraq, you will then have caught Moore in a lie. Otherwise, his statements about Iraq vis a vis America are absolutely true.